What children and adolescents know about war and how to answer their questions

School-age children usually they see war as something distant to them. José (8) is disturbed to hear that a war is going on, and he asks where the countries involved are. When he sees them away from Ecuador, he comments: “But I’m sure that’s never happened here”. Upon hearing about the Cenepa war (Ecuador and Peru, 1995), she is surprised.

Given this, the clinical psychologist and educator in positive discipline Kathalina Urquizo recommends:

• Don’t avoid the subject, but don’t talk too much either. Tailor your talk to the child’s age. With the little ones (under 5 years old) make a diet of information, because violent acts generate greater stress for them. “Before the age of 5, it’s best not to talk about this unless absolutely necessary.”
• Between the 6 and 12 years, the boys move on to more structured thinking. Even if they don’t say it, they are attentive. Ask them what they have heard, what they know. “Let’s handle the information from their knowledge and not from ours”, advises the specialist.

• Explain that conflicts have been going on for a long time, they didn’t just happen out of the blue. This lessens uncertainty, and works with anticipation: they realize that the war has a history. “This lowers the stress level.”
• Beyond the 12 years is the correct age to sit down and talk with your children, because they will have many questions. You will discover that they handle more information than you think. Josías (18) understands war as “a conflict between two or several countries; depending on the magnitude, it can be the case of violent acts”. His feelings when he hears news on the subject have a lot to do with the place where the conflicts take place, “since there is always war in the countries of the Middle East, but when the rumors are of great powers, the situation changes there” . In the most recent case, he admits that He has talked with his parents about the news, “because they can make a big change in the world.”
• Whatever the age of your children, be aware of your own emotions on the subject. “I can’t talk to my son if I’m full of anguish,” says Urquizo.

Do not think that children and adolescents do not understand just because they don’t ask or don’t comment. The little ones are able to read the emotions around them, only that they are expressed in other ways, through their games and drawings. And adolescents, who handle language better, distance themselves from adults because they feel that they are not interested in their world. “We are the ones called to get involved.”

Talking to young people: what to say about war and international conflicts?

“We can say that it is the first global conflict of great importance and that it also has a digital media burden that others did not have,” says Tina Zerega, research professor at Casa Grande University.

“Although there have been other wars that have been highly mediated, I would say that this is the first serious conflict, in terms of globality, that we have in an environment of digital social networks.” It’s not that the above don’t count, but they were only spread by a mass media system. “News travels much faster, information systems and platforms are more connected.” This is a generation of more globalized citizenseven if digital divides are taken into account.

“I work with adolescents and young people, and I remember that during the US elections in which Trump won, they were very connected to that geopolitical situation, something that was not in the discussions or conversations with them before,” says Zerega. “But those of us who are in educational environments are becoming aware of certain contexts: young people are more informed about the conflicts, they want to talk more about certain issues, movements or social causes”.

It is also well known that there are more and more migration and internationalization phenomena, and other countries no longer sound distant to young people, due to the cultural industries they consume. “There is a greater awareness of global citizenshipthat what happens, be it political, economic or war, can directly affect the immediate environment of your country or your city and generates concern.

Much of what young people know is from their presence on social media. Is what we see on networks about war real? The issue of reality is complex, says Zerega. What the mass media give us is an edited and trimmed representation, with a certain officiality, of each situation.

“What we have now is citizen journalism,” which, while interesting, does not imply that there is a professional journalist, continues the communicator. “Social networks have allowed actors in the conflict who previously had no voice to report the things that happen to them directly”.

That’s good, because he speaks to us from a place that journalism could not access. But, on the other hand, there is the excess of information, between the official story and citizen journalism. “It is a wealth, but at the same time a riskbecause it could be that we are consuming in algorithmic bubbles (news that captures attention and therefore is repeated), exposed to the same voices that make others invisible”.

Then it is up to the citizens (also the youngest) to develop functions of critical consumption of what they read and see, and feed themselves from different sources. Doubt: Who is telling me this? From where? What is it showing me and what is it not showing me? “It is a challenge for educators and for the family to help young people to be suspicious of what they are seeing.”

Yes, we must talk about the war, but from a critical point of view, taking into account both versions. “You can try to do empathic exercises from side to side.”

This dialogue with young people gives them the opportunity to show them that we can approach conflicts through words, and not through acts and attacks, with words as a secondary mediator. “Training people from a place where violence is the last resort is beneficial. Know that there are other mechanisms, talk, empathize, investigate, review, negotiate”.

Building the rules of the game as a family

“War is about using force to get what you want,” say writers and philosophers Briggitte Labbe and Michel Puech in the children’s book The war and the peace (SM, 2002). They describe war as the natural impulse of human beings to use force to fight, to impose, to snatch.

Peace, on the other hand, is not natural. It has to be built with effort, sacrifice and education (and for this reason it may seem ‘boring’ to some). “If people forget this, and believe that peace is natural, they will forget to build it and risk war,” the authors warn.

Human beings cannot be stripped of their natural instinct. but they exist the mechanisms of peace: the laws and the right, which allow us to live in society. As in games, where there are rules that everyone must know and respect, or they will not be able to continue in the game. By accepting the same rules, people build peace.

Yet the rules of entertainment today seem to reward outbursts of violence more than fair play. Children have become accustomed to aggression on TV, movies and video games, says the psychologist Urquizo.

“In the series for minors every 3 minutes there is an explosion of violence”, with the peculiarity that this has no real or palpable consequences, since the animated characters come back to life again and again and the actors reappear as if nothing happened in a new movie. That in children generates a disconnection with reality.

What happens with video games is more serious, says Urquizo, because they interact with the brain circuit. “With each shot, a rise in energy is generated. adrenalin, putting the player in a state of alert”. Under normal circumstances, the brain puts us on alert to get to safety, and then slows down. In the video game, the state of alert is constant, although the danger is not ‘real’. Now calculate, How much time do your children spend playing?

In addition to the adrenaline, there is the dopamine, the hormone of pleasure and reward, which makes us return to the game again and again to keep adding points. And complete the circle immersive experiencean increasingly refined mechanism that makes the player feel part of the story and develop an attachment to it.

That need for attachment and belonging, in theory, should be satisfied by family ties, says the psychologist. “Before it was easier, because there were large family gatherings, where we knew that the grandfather did such a thing, that the uncles said this or that this was liked by father or mother. There was a structured history, guided by the processes of family communication. That has been lost.”

The therapist mentions that when talking to children in consultation, very few know what their parents do. That does not mean that they no longer crave attachment, but rather that they seek it in other things.

A specialist in story therapy and therapeutic writing, Urquizo says that the story allows us to approach the child and talk about difficult topics, of those emotions difficult to name and recognize. Anger, fear, grief, anxiety.

The story allows the child to see what is happening with less apprehension (“it doesn’t just happen to me”), and to have less anxiety when identifying with one of the characters. This way you can see the problem from a certain distance and look for solutions. “I give a name to what I feel, I begin to process my emotions and find different solutions.” (F)